I tell stories. I would like to share them with you.

Main menu

Tag Archives: outside

My method for the giveaway was: I collected the names of people who commented, liked or followed since I announced the drawing. I placed all the names into a numbered list in the order that I found them in my notifications (which means the list is not ran domized, but it might as well be). There were twenty-nine names, so I asked the algorithm at random.org to pick a number between 1 and 29. It chose 16. I have an image file of the names and the result page from random.org. It’s cumbersome to post, but I’ve saved it in case anybody’s curious about how it went.

Random.org chose number 16, who is Wendy Christensen. But I don’t have an email address for you, Wendy! I’ll give you three days — until midnight Pacific time, Monday October 27: after that I’ll run a new number from random.org.

As for what I’m doing tonight: I’m visiting Southern California with my daughter and son-in-law. We’re having a wonderful time. It’s just different enough from our Central Coast home to give us the right amount of culture shock, and the landscape is of course gorgeous.

You have one more day to sign up for the drawing for a free copy of my book Outside! Just go to the post where I announced it, right here, and leave a comment with a way to contact you. I’ll be on the road tomorrow so I’ll probably do it late in the day.

Other upcoming dates: the anthology Missed Connections, edited by the redoubtable Tanni-Fan, which has my story “Rab+Rob 4 Evar,” is coming out November 11, and is available for pre-order now. And my multiple-universes science fiction novella, A and A Salvage, is also available for pre-order and is coming out December 9.

These three stories are really quite different one from another. Outside is about a science lab administrator on a deep space station who takes great effort to ensure that his friends have a good time and learns that he needs to make even a greater effort: “Rab+Rob” is about an environmental sciences student who discovers his memory is even worse than he thought it was: and A and A Salvage is about a pair of lesbian mechanics who figure out that the origin of a mysterious car also gives them dangerous knowledge about the fate of old friends (I have more to say about the world of Outside and also more to say about the adventures of Elisabeth and Melissa from A and A Salvage, but those stories are not written yet).

Also, more details about this later, but I have sold another piece, a story about a fellow whose parents emigrated because they were told their child would marry a tree…

It’s vexacious to try to summarize a book, whether you’re putting together a query, or writing a blurb, or trying to get someone to review it. It makes me want to throw my hands in the air and just go back and write some more stories and forget the finished ones.

This afternoon I submitted requests to a couple of online review sites that take them, though, and in the process I coined a nice fat name for the genre I declare I have created: The science fiction workplace buddy romance. I’m maybe a bit too smug about this. I immediately tweeted this, and then told my friends in chat, and now I’m telling everybody. I may email my son later so he can share in the deliciousness of that genere label.

As I’ve already told everyone who will listen and quite a few people who probably would rather not, I am not ashamed of piling up four adjectival nouns in one descriptive phrase. It’s positively Anglo-Saxon poetry. Anyway, now I want to go through my “stories to write” file and see how many of them could be called that.

Reminder: you can still sign up for a free copy of Outside right here.

And now that I’ve done some obligatory promotion of that book, I have edits to work on in another science fiction buddy workplace romance-this one is about lesbian mechanics who discover how to get to a whole new world through carjacking-and a manuscript I need to write, about something completely different. I’m sure I will tell you all about them when the time comes.

Happy Autumnal Equinox everybody! In my Mediterranean climate, that means we have some hope for luscious rain and green hills in a couple of months. (I suppose it’s Vernal if you live in the southern hemisphere, though. If you do, happy Spring to you)

I enjoy the softer air and the promising clouds and the pretty autumn light, but I must admit that the shorter days knock me off my procrastinating butt. Speaking of time . . . it’s been almost two weeks since Outside came out, and I think it’s high time for me to give away a copy of it to a deserving commenter!

I have a free copy of Outside to give away. I’m going to send it to one person who comments on this post before October 21 (you have a whole month!) I’m going to do this in the simplest way. Replies will be assigned a number in chronological order and I’ll use random.org to pick the number of the winner. Just make sure your comment includes a way to get hold of you if you win!

Some people already know me, under one of three names: my given name, which you see at the top of this page;”ritaxis” on livejournal and ina few other places; and “plumblossom,” which is the name I used for the writing I did just-for-fun for several years.

I intend for this to be a more focused blog than my livejournal. Here I will just deal with writing and publishing and genre. I expect it to be, among other things, a handy space to keep readers posted about what I’ve got out and what I’ve got coming out, and of course whatever pops up that is somehow related to those things.

For example, right this minute I have a nice little science fiction novella, which LessThan Three Press has made available in several ebook formats for $5.99. You can buy it here.

Less Than Three is primarily a publisher of “anything but straight” romances. So, as you might guess, Outside is anything but a straight romance (pretty much however you take the phrase). Our fellows are geologists working in a larger complex of labs attached to an extra-solar space station. They are having an amusing little affair when Gamble is drafted against his will to head up a “field” expedition which is the great opportunity of Flint’s dreams. Because of their relationship, Gamble feels he can’t hire him, so he makes a nice recommendation for Flint when he leaves. When he comes back he finds Flint in a terrible bind, in a way that looks like Gamble is to blame. In the process of figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it Gamble starts questioning his whole approach to life.

I ought to say, even though it ought to be obvious, that this is a workplace friendship-romance and definitely not “hard science fiction.” I don’t even know whether the people are traveling sub-lightspeed (but I think they are). If you are the kind of reader whose pleasure in reading science fiction is speculating about what specific machinery the space station uses to simulate gravity, and what sort of drive the spaceship uses to leave the solar system, you might be happiuer with a different book. What was fun about writing this was thinking about the many varieties of social organization that people might invent for themselves when they live in space for some generations. I’m thinking of stations that are the size of large cities, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people (in this story I don’t get into it but I don’t think this space living is a response to the breakdown and impoverishment of Earth: I just can’t believe in a future where we can’t feed ourselves but we somehow have the resources to mail ourselves around the galaxy).

Gamble was raised in one variation: he had three parents growing up, who were a team of professional parent specialists. A friend olf his is in another, as she belongs to a complex chain marriage. And then there’s the sation itself, which is downright baroque, and finally Gamble’s relationship with Flint. Like most of my work, Outside contains a sizeable cast of diverse characters with their own lives and motivaions.

Just so you know, Less than Three is having a giveaway in celebration of the book coming out. But you only have till September 24th to sign up for your chance!